The man asks again for advice from the stranger and he/she tells him to catch a large man-eating magical cat called Bajun who lives on an iron column in the thrice tenth kingdom.
Russian scholarship classifies the tale, in the East Slavic Folktale Classification (Russian: СУС, romanized: SUS), as tale type SUS 465A, "Красавица-жена («Пойди туда, не знаю куда»)" ("Beautiful Wife ('Go Somewhere, I Don't Know Where')"): a royal archer (or a poor man) marries a supernatural maiden; the emperor, wishing to have her to himself, sends the archer on difficult quests he accomplishes with his wife's help.
Some time later, an emperor, lord or nobleman of superior rank lusts after the wife of supernatural origin and sends the mortal husband on impossible quests.
[5] Professor Susan Hoogasian-Villa mentioned variants where the hero (a prince or a hunter) marries a maiden that becomes an aquatic animal (mostly fish, but sometimes a frog or a tortoise) or a kind of bird.
[6] Graham Anderson also noted that the supernatural wife in this tale type appears to show "amphibious connections", since she wears the disguise of a water animal (fish, turtle, frog).
[7] Scholars Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana, in the Arab and Palestinian parallels they gathered, noted that the human husband is a fisherman "in most other [tales]".
[9] Folklorist Lev Barag [ru] noted the resemblance between a Belarusian variant and tales from Asian peoples wherein a poor and destitute youth marries the daughter of a god.
[11] Likewise, scholars Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana stated that "in each case [of every tale]", the male protagonist is helped by his wife and her relatives (mother and/or sisters).
[20] Seki Keigo pinned down its appearance in some literary collections of his country, such as in Nihongi, the Ryoi-ki and the Sangoku Denki [ja].
Suspecting something is amiss, the boy stays in waiting and sees a fish coming out of the sea and taking their fishskin off, revealing itself to be a beautiful maiden.
[30] In a tale translated by Jeremiah Curtin, Go to the Verge of Destruction and Bring Back Shmat-Razum, one of the king's sharpshooters, named Fedot, spares a blue dove and she becomes a "soul-maiden", a lovely tsar's daughter.
[32] In a tale published by journalist Post Wheeler, Schmat-Razum, the bowman Taraban, while on a hunt, sees seven white ducks with silver wings beneath a tree.
Months into their domestic arrangement, the falcon maiden wants to help her human husband improve is material wealth, so she weaves for him a carpet, and tells him to sell by the nighest price.
The falcon maiden, named Elena the Beautiful, summons magical help to produce the golden sheep's head and the pig hair.
[38] In a tale from the Gagauz people, Concerning the Sun, collected by Moshkov and translated by Charles Fillingham Coxwell [de], a tsar orders his three sons to shoot three arrows to decide their fates.
Every stop he is asked by a person about a problem, and the tsar's son promises to bring the questions to God (tale type ATU 461, "Three Hairs from the Devil's Beard").
He decides to discover who is this mysterious housekeeper: he hides one day and sees that the frog casts off its amphibian skin to become a human maiden.
[42] In a Georgian tale translated by Caucasologist Heinz Fähnrich [de] with the title Die Tochter der Sonne ("The Daughter of the Sun"), three friends work together in the fields.
The man follows the apple and finds a deer with giant antlers, an emaciated bull and a priest carrying a church on his back who ask him the answers for their problems.
He also meets a strange couple, a woman building a tower with eggs, a baker who burns bread in an oven, and they explain they are being punished for misdeeds in their lives.
[44] In a 1991 article, researcher Suzanna A. Gullakian [hy] noted a similar combination between tale types 402, "The Frog Bride", and 465, "The Man persecuted because of his Beautiful Wife", in Armenia.
[45] A similar story is attested in the Typen türkischer Volksmärchen ("Turkish Folktale Catalogue"), devised by scholars Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Naili Boratav.
[47] In other variants, the fairy maiden (a peri) comes out of a piece of wood the male character (named Mehmet Efendi) takes home.
[48] In a Turkish tale published by Ignác Kúnos with the title The Fish-Peri, a young, poor fisherman catches a fish so beautiful it saddens him to sell it or cook it, so he decides to keep it in a well.
However, news of her beauty reach the ears of the Padishah, who begins to lust after the maiden, and sets the fisherman on three difficult quests: to build a palace of gold and diamond in the middle of the sea in 40 days; to prepare a feast so grand everyone would eat and there would still be much food left; to have a mule hatch out of an egg, and to find a year-old infant who could talk and walk.
Preceded by tale type ATU 653A, "The Rarest Thing in the World", the story continues as Prince Ahmad marries the Peri Banou, the daughter of the king of the jinni.
[57] In a Buryat tale, "Молодец и его жена-лебедь" (Mongolian: "Сагаан шубуугаар haмга хэhэн хубуун"; English: Molodets and his Swan-Wife), a down-on-his-luck boy tries to get a job herding horses in the steppes, lumbering for an old man and even planting crops, but no such luck.
[63] German ethnologue Leo Frobenius collected a tale from Kordofan with the title Das Girdamädchen ("The Monkey Girl"):[64] an emir gives a spear to each of his three sons.
After he announces he will visit his third son, the youth complains to his wife that she is an animal, and she offers to finds him a good human spouse by directing him to a village in the desert.
In Swedish author Maria Gripe's novel Agnes Cecilia - en sällsam historia, a copy of Narodnye russkie skazki repeatedly falls from its shelf, opening to the page containing the phrase.